Aristotle on the Bible

Aristotle on Genesis Genesis is about how people and the things on earth come to be. God created all according to the Bible. Aristotle argues about how thing come to be and evolve in the book Physics. In Ethics Aristotle talks about how people should act and how they should conduct themselves and in the Bible it also makes reference to how people act and the consequences of their actions. Virtue is what Aristotle talks about in Ethics and how people become virtuous. Aristotle’s ideas contradict some of the ideas in the bible which causes Christians to ban some of his work.

If Aristotle told the first book of the bible Genesis in his own words, though it would be different, it would be similar and have some of the main points it all ready has. Aristotle would say that God causes all motion in nature, because he believed that god is the unmovable mover. Aristotle believes that things transform from their adolescent stage to their maturity stage of life. He says that the adolescent form works its way up to maturity. He believes that the mature form of something existed first. So Aristotle basically believed that the chicken came before the egg.

In the bible it talks about creation and how God created heaven and the earth and he created man and woman first in their mature stage and then they produced children in their adolescent forms. When God created everything he created them in their mature form before he named them. Aristotle doesn’t believe that one thing created the heavens and the earth because you can’t create what already exists. Aristotle would say that god created man first in likeness of himself. Aristotle would say that God made people to govern over all because they have rationality and morality.

A person’s rational is their supreme good. He would argue that God made plants then he made animals then lastly he made man the most difficult and supreme being on earth. God sets no rules on Adam and Eve because they are truly virtuous so they would not need any rules, but because they ate of the forbidden fruit they were not made virtuously and they need to practice being virtuous to become morally virtue. Aristotle says that the main goal of man is to be happy and for man to be happy he must seek out moral and intellectual virtue. Man is the image of God and his goal is to be pure and have pure thoughts.

Intellectual virtue is aimed at questioning God for the achievement of happiness. So in the pursuit of happiness Eve ate from the tree questioning God. Aristotle would say if god created everything including the Earth, why when he flooded the earth he only destroyed the animals why not he destroyed the whole earth because the things that cause people to be disobedient was on the earth. This idea comes back to the idea that God did not create the heaven and earth, and that it was already in existence. Aristotle would say that God cares nothing of our worship he is the supreme god.

But According to Genesis, he does want to be worshiped praised and obeyed. Aristotle would say that admiration for him is his pursuit of happiness. Man is made in God’s likeness, who and is moral and virtuous, because god is moral and virtuous he is happy. Man wants to be happy so he strives to be moral and virtuous through his praise and obedience to God. When Cain and Able where bringing sacrifices to God they were trying to be obedient in their pursuit of happiness but when God favored one over the other it caused the other to act ungodly and immorally because he wasn’t happy.

Aristotle calls God the unmovable mover he believes that god is above all but didn’t create what already existed but he did create man, animals, plants, and whatever else is on earth. Aristotle would say that the maturity form of things came before the adolescent form in which a adolescent form derived and transformed and matured. The Pursuit of happiness is what is what drives people to do what they do. The only true way for a person to be happy is if they have moral and intellectual virtue.

Man was not made with virtue but it is gained through learning and experience and that is how Adam and Eve had to do after eating the forbidden fruit they were not obedient to God so they did not moral and intellectual virtue causing it to be learned and stead of man being made with it. If Aristotle wrote Genesis I think he would say heaven and earth was already in existence everything was put on earth by a supreme being in its mature form and it was named, it was already known because the thing is mad into hat likeness of the name. So Aristotle would san the name man was before man himself and man was made into the likeness of the name. Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden fruit to seek and internal happiness is what Aristotle would say. Adam and Eve do bad things or disobey the supreme being because they don’t know any better hence when they eat from the tree of knowledge they then know they have disobeyed is what Aristotle would say.